Originally posted by photolady95 Why are your snowflakes white instead of crystal clear like some I've seen? Nice capture though. I just was curious about the color.
Flakes, because they are ice, are mostly transparent. In shots where the flake is perfectly flat to the camera and backlit, it will seem mostly transparent, with shiny edges.
But, just like a glass pane, at some angles they will reflect a ton of light. So, depending on the position of the flash and the camera with respect to the flake, you can get a snowflake to "light up". I call the angle where the flake most lights up the "Komarechka angle", after one of the masters of snowflake photos,
Don Komarechka, whose amazing shots pretty much always leverage this fact.
You'll notice that when the flake is lit up that way, it's usually not parallel to the plane of the camera's sensor. This makes it even more essential to focus stack for this type of shot.
The image I have which best illustrates how the look of snowflakes in photos will vary based on the angle that it's lit and viewed from is the following, where I happened to successfully shoot stacks the same flake from three different angles in quick succession. Actually, the three angles are pretty close, but you can see how the look of the snowflake varies significantly from one to the other:
Note that this snowflake is also peculiar because there appears to be a "crink" in it, meaning that it's not all in the same plane, which is very unusual. Note also that these shots weren't taken with a Raynox, so they are a bit OT for the thread... Sorry.